Winter Landscape with Figures and a Windmill by Jacob Van Ruisdael (1670's).

Archfiend of Ifnir by Seb McKinnon.

As we prepare to close out the old year and ring in 2022, one of the things content creators love to do is run down their top ten or twenty cards from the previous year. Sometimes they'll do their top and bottom five or ten cards, but today I'm going to wax a little more philosophical than just churning out another list.

I do love lists, but I've never been one to buy a copy of every new EDH precon and I haven't been in the habit of buying a booster box of every set that comes out. That doesn't mean I couldn't give you my own top 10 of 2021, but my fellow writers here at CSI are more than capable of giving you those kinds of insights. Jason, Corbin, Mark, Abe and Paige are all great writers and if you're just looking for a list of this year's best, favorite or most interesting cards I am confident that at least a few of their end-of-year columns will have you covered.

Today I'd like to look back at the five biggest takeaways I personally have from 2021.

A Return to In Person Play

A year ago, we had just started to see people getting vaccinated for COVID-19, but most local game stores had not started allowing in person play. A lot of us were still not sure if the LGS we called home would make it through the pandemic and lots of game stores probably didn't survive.

At some point in 2021, most of us who are avid and active Commander players found ourselves once again able to play paper Magic. Some stores continued to require masks through 2021 and even up to today, while many relaxed their in-store requirements in line with local ordinances being lifted. The LGS I play at lifted the requirement to wear masks, though there are a few players who continue wearing them. I tend to think of them as "the smart ones" but it's just as likely they have someone who is unvaccinated, immunocompromised or elderly in their lives and they just don't want to risk bringing the virus home even if they themselves are vaccinated.

The Commander League I've run since 2016 started up again, with a new July-June season. In previous years we ran our season from January to December, tallying points on a month-by-month basis but also recognizing the top point getters at the end of the year at a holiday potluck celebration.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, we had been seeing record numbers in our league. We were regularly filling six tables and given the store's location, I found that pretty impressive. When the league started up again this summer, we had more than a few weekends with only one or two tables, but we kept at it. We actually had five tables of EDH players at the holiday potluck we held earlier this month as a mid-season celebration.

The store has also started up Modern nights, Draft nights and even started holding Modern 1k, 1.5k and 2k tournaments on a monthly basis. Those high payoff Modern tournaments are a minor thorn in my side, as they run on Saturdays and leave us with much less space to be able to run the EDH League, but they bring in money to the store so I really can't complain.

With the Omicron variant on the rise, there is definitely a feeling of nervousness about stores getting shut down again, but at this point it looks like the number of people who are vaccinated should be something of a bulwark against us seeing a full shutdown again.

My first takeaway feels a little obvious, but it has just been great to see in person play again. I have to appreciate what we have because there's no knowing if another variant will come along to screw everything up again. Maybe we're nearly out of the woods, but it's hard to be too sure.

New Faces, New Friends

The return to in-person play has seen a bit of churn in my local meta. Local regulars that used to be at the LGS every Saturday have disappeared. As with any game store community, not everyone knows everybody's story so for the most part I have no idea why so-and-so hasn't been around. Some probably were scared off from in-person play and are biding their time before jumping back into the game. I know there are players who have moved on from Magic entirely. I'd bet that a few folks have moved or have changes in their lives or jobs that keep them from joining back into EDH League play or even casual play.

While it's always sad to realize you haven't seen old tablemates since before the shutdown, it's also been great to get to know some of the new players that have gotten into the game.

Like any LGS, the one I frequent is the usual rogue's gallery of weirdos and wise-asses. It's not quite the Mos Eisley cantina - we have no special effects budget - but it's a great microcosm of the great wide world of Commander.

We've got the dude with a dirty mouth and dirtier mind, but who keeps an eye out for any kids in the store and who never slings barbs and vitriol with any real sense of anger or meanness. We've got Stinky (every LGS seems to have a Stinky). We've got Spikes. We've got the judge with complete mastery of the smile, sigh and eyeroll reaction when asked just the right rules question. We've got that guy who doesn't win as much as he'd probably like, but also refuses to resort to combo and yet somehow manages to keep a positive attitude and not get too frustrated. We've got that young kid still learning how to navigate playing high powered and cEDH decks without just pubstomping. We've got quite a few of those guys who play relatively fair decks, care about having balanced games and are just fantastic tablemates.

We've also seen a bunch of new players come into the meta and show a fantastic ability to play and compete at a high level in our casual EDH environment. My EDH League may be a league, but there are no prizes and the goal is really to have a fun afternoon of Commander every Saturday. The churn in our meta has seen new faces who had only been with us briefly, if at all, before the shutdown. Getting to know these new guys, their playstyles and their decks has been a lot of fun and fills me with hope for the future of the league.

I'll admit that when things opened back up, I was feeling a bit down about the future of the community I had been working so hard on building over the previous few years. It took a while for players to start showing up regularly again. The fresh faces that have been jumping in, sometimes with a huge splash and sometimes so gracefully that it felt like they'd always been there, have gone a long way toward making me feel like the hours of work I put in is absolutely still worth it.

The Competitive Gap

When I first got into Commander, I wasn't really even aware of cEDH. It took years of play to really get an understanding of what's going on at the top of our format's power scale and over those years things have changed.

The best lens I have for looking at and understanding the gap between EDH and cEDH is probably my experience running my free, prizeless EDH League. I've long wanted the league to accept all players and all decks. The line between cEDH and high-powered EDH is indeed a fuzzy one, and I never wanted to tell someone they couldn't play because their deck was too good.

In the early years, that approach worked.

The top decks and top players would nail down their wins with a lot of consistency but it was rare that a table would see games that were over so quickly that people openly wondered why they bothered to come to the LGS in the first place. You might have a rough game every once in a while, but most cEDH players either weren't playing such fast decks that the result was a non-game, or they had the good sense to play the right deck for the table they were at.

In the year or so before the shutdown that began to change. The EDH League was attracting more players and that meant we started seeing more highly tuned EDH decks. My solution was to keep the highly competitive and tuned EDH decks in the league but to group them as much as possible. You might have a more casual EDH player stuck at the table filled with high-powered decks to fill out a group of four, but in general it seemed to work. The league is casual and does not allow proxies, so the number of fully tuned cEDH-style decks was definitely not so big that it was a problem.

During the shutdown I think a few things happened that changed this dynamic.

More and more players got into cEDH, or at least something close to it, over the months where we had to play online. Playing online often means playing with whatever cards you want, not just what you have in paper. That meant that coming out of the shutdown I think we had an increase in the number of players who both wanted to play more competitive decks and who really wanted to be able to use proxies in league games.

I also suspect that more people playing online might have resulted in a detachment from player being as invested in their tablemates' enjoyment of the game. If you're playing with strangers, it's just easier to write off someone's reaction to you running roughshod over them because you don't know them and might not care about their experience. When you're sitting down in person, it's a lot harder to just not care if you're the only one having fun.

My feeling - and I'll admit that it is just a gut feeling - is that the gap between competitive, highly-tuned EDH and a more casual EDH has widened to a point where I'm going to have to change the way I run my league.

I've got players actively dreading being paired up with the players with highly tuned decks, and I've got competitive players who openly pubstomp obviously weaker decks with no apologies and no sense that they're doing anything wrong. Honestly, it's a league, so there's a real argument that they actually aren't doing anything wrong.

If my takeaway from this growing dynamic is that the power gap in EDH is now so great that there's basically no bridging it, my response has to be to find a way to try to serve both of these communities of players.

As of this writing, my plan is to run 2 leagues.

No, I don't really want extra work, but if I do it right, it won't be that much extra work and if the result is happy and excited cEDH players and happy and relieved EDH players enjoying their own styles of Commander every Saturday afternoon, it will be well worth it.

Our EDH league rounds are capped at 2 hours, and often see games of an hour, 90 minutes or more. In stark contrast, it's not uncommon to have cEDH games end on turn two or three.

I still have to flush out the details, but my basic plan is to have the cEDH group run a four hour "cEDH Jam" in which they jam as many games as they can, earning a point per win. They will operate semi-independently of the casual league - ignoring our round 1 and round 2 and handling their own table shuffling. I'll be available to help but I mostly will want them to manage their games on their own - if nothing else, I'll be busy playing my own games in the casual league.

I'm optimistic that this will work, and if you've run into similar issues and have a large enough player base that you can split off your cEDH players entirely from the EDH crowd, I definitely encourage you to do so. Sure, it might be eye-opening for a regular casual player to see their first turn two loss to a tuned Ad Nauseam cEDH deck, but in the long run I do not think mixing cEDH and casual EDH has enough upside to allow it to continue to happen.

Finding Joy in New Places

When I first got into Commander, I enjoyed the occasional win and I enjoyed an engaging loss if I was able to play my deck and actually do something in the game. When I started running my EDH League, I found a new way to enjoy this hobby. Bringing people together has always been something I like to do, so helping to create a community of Commander players was a rewarding experience.

When I went down to CommandFest DC in December of 2019, it was my first chance to experience what it's like to participate in a huge gathering of Commander players. That is still the greatest Commander experience I've had to this date, and I am looking forward to someday attending another big event. I'm really not sure why I didn't go to MagicFest Las Vegas, as a bunch of guys from my local meta went down there to play Modern. I guess it just didn't have enough of a focus on Commander to be on my radar, but from what I've heard it was a lot of fun and there was an area at the event devoted to our format.

My 2021 journey into learning how to alter cards has definitely opened my eyes to a new part of the Magic experience. I love the feeling of getting into a groove painting a new card, and even when I'm not in love with the final result I still love the experience of creating something new for myself that nobody else in the world has in their collection.

The biggest surprise from my experience of altering cards has probably been the reaction people have to seeing them. I have primarily been making alters of Muppets, though I've done quite a few Nightmare Before Christmas alters as well, and the reactions they generally get are just wonderful.

I'm looking forward to the next big CommandFest and I'm already imagining spending a day playing only Muppet-altered decks. I can see myself being shuffled into a table and asking my tablemates to "pick a muppet... any muppet" as a way of deciding what deck I'll be playing. My wife recently gave me a t-shirt with a big blue Cookie Monster on it, and I imagine having people asking each other if they've played against that guy with the Cookie Monster shirt who's playing all the Muppet decks.

I imagine a lot of things. Heck, I've imagined painting a Kenrith, the Returned King alter as Jim Henson sitting on a throne surrounded by Muppets. In my daydream, I see myself getting invited to play on Game Knights with all of my various Muppet commanders assembled into that Kenrith Muppets deck for a special episode devoted to alters and alterists.

I'm not that good at painting cards yet, nor would I probably be the best person to get such an invite. There are much more accomplished alterists and there are Commander decks with much better alters than what I've been able to do in my first year. Still, it's been an absolute joy to get into this new part of our hobby and it's fun to even be able to have such a daydream.

Commander is King, Baby

My last takeaway from 2021 isn't exactly news, but from where I sit it looks very much like Commander has solidified its place as the dominant format.

Am I biased? Of course I'm biased, but it's hard to not see that a year of not being able to play sanctioned Magic formats has resulted in Commander really entrenching itself as a cornerstone format of Magic.

We have more focus on legendary creatures with every new set than ever before. Secret Lair products are clearly aimed at our playerbase, to the point where the first Secret Lair deck ever created just happens to be a Commander deck.

Nearly everyone who plays has a Commander deck. If you have a Cube, there's a very good chance it's a Commander Cube. Competitive players who want to play EDH have an active and robust cEDH community with an incredible devotion to honing and improving the fastest and best decks in the format.

That doesn't mean there aren't other formats, and that those other formats don't matter.

Magic is changing and evolving every year. New formats pop up and die off. Players push for cEDH to be split off from EDH, or for a new, better rule set to be adopted in place of the current EDH Rules Committee's guidelines. None of this is new, but at this point in time I don't see anything pushing Commander out of its central position in the world of Magic: The Gathering.

Commander is in a really good place, but also in a place where it is more important than ever for competitive players to resist the temptation to pubstomp and score easy wins against obviously underpowered opponents. I think cEDH is on an upswing and proxy use is more and more accepted. The temptation is also very real to argue that cEDH is still just EDH so they should be able to share a table. Sure, they are both EDH, but I don't think it serves either party to have them playing in the same pod.

Final Thoughts

While these past few years have been trying on many levels, I think there's a lot to be happy about in the world of Commander. We're in a very good place and despite all the hair-pulling about changes to the EDH banlist, I do think the Rules Committee are making good decisions with the health of the format in mind.

In retrospect, I think if I were more into werewolves and vampires I might have been more excited about Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow. If I had been more interested in Magic expanding beyond its native lore I might have been more excited about Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. All three of those sets were fine, but I didn't really fall in love with many of the products Wizards of the Coast gave us in 2021. Coming off the Year of Commander, with Commander Legends reinvigorating our format like no set before it, it's not surprising that this past year was a minor letdown in comparison.

My 2022 plans definitely involve painting more alters. I've already sketched out a Hobbit hole design for Homeward Path that will hopefully evoke the artwork from the old Rankin-Bass animated film from the 1970's. I'm also planning on slowly filling a small trade binder with extras so that if I do ever make it to another big event I'll have something really neat to share and trade or sell to other players.

I could see painting a few more Kermit drinking Lipton Tea alters onto Spore Frogs and I haven't yet really explored the art of Chuck Jones or tried my hand at Star Wars or Marvel alters. I'm a long way from trying to paint realistic human faces, but Darth Vader, Stormtroopers, Iron Man, Vision's Mind Stone and other designs should be within my capabilities at this point.

If you've got thoughts about how to properly handle high-power EDH decks in a more casual EDH meta, I'd love to hear them. I think I've got a good plan for moving forward, but It's been something I've struggled with for a few years now, so feel free to leave a comment if you've got ideas that might help.

That's all I've got for now. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and 2022 brings you a year of great new decks and fantastic Commander games!

Thanks for reading and I'll see you in January!